President Obama, as is proven after every major speech he
delivers, is a Rorschach inkblot: Those on whom he has a mesmeric hold, see the
silhouette of a leader worthy of placement on Mount Rushmore. To them, he can
say or do no wrong. Those of us who are not so captivated by his words see a
very different image and hear a very different message when he speaks. Consider
his two major speeches so far this year: the Inaugural Address and the State of
the Union.

In the State of the Union, the president repeated his tired and
flatly-wrong reference to “the tide of war receding,” promised “a new defense
strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world” and pointed
to a looming payroll-tax increase as “our most immediate priority.” Of course, what
should be the “most immediate priority” for him and Congress is a problem of
his own making: the sequestration guillotine hanging over the military.

The president innocently noted that “Congress passed a
law” requiring a trillion dollars in automatic spending cuts in the event
that the deficit cannot be reduced through the normal policymaking process. He
derided the sequestration cuts as “sudden, harsh, arbitrary” and noted that lots
of people have called sequestration “a really bad idea.” (Indeed, it would
trigger spending cuts to the U.S. military of $500 billion.) But although he
repeatedly demanded that Congress “send me a bill”—to reform immigration, to
punish outsourcing, to reform the tax code, to change mortgage-lending rules,
to “limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact”
(now there’s an enforceable law)—there were no solutions about sequestration, no
responsibility for its existence.

The fact is that his White House came up with the sequestration
ideaand yet he didn’t offer alternatives
to what his outgoing defense secretary describes as “shooting
ourselves in the head.”

Already, while entitlement spending mushrooms, the Pentagon
has coughed up $487 billion at the president’s direction. The Navy has been
ordered to cut the number of surface combatants from 85 ships to 78, stretch
the “build time” of new aircraft carriers from five to seven years, and had to
seek a special congressional waiverto deploy just 10 carriers (rather than the legally-mandated 11) while the USS Gerald Ford is built. The Air Force has
announced plans to reduce its fleet by 286 planes. The active-duty Army will be
cut from 570,000 soldiers to 490,000; the Marines from 202,000 to 182,000. And
there’s virtually no investment in modernization. Although the defense budget
grew by $300 billion in the decade after 9/11, the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) notes that just 16 percent of that increase was
earmarked for modernization and new weapons systems. However, CSBApoints out a dozen new weapons systems were terminated and many systems had
their numbers cut below end-strength goals (e.g., the F-22). “The aggregate
effect is that a significant portion of DOD’s investment in modernization over
the past decade did not result in force modernization.”

To
get a sense of the modernization crisis, consider that the Air Force now plans
to keep flying B-52 bombers through 2040. The first B-52 took to the skies in
1954. The Air Force is relying on reconnaissance airframes built in 1955,
tankers built in 1956, fighter-bombers built in 1974 and stealth bombers (there
are only 20 of them) built in 1989.

Sequestration
will only exacerbate these issues: less modernization, older equipment, fewer
troops, more cuts.

These cuts might make sense if peace were breaking out all
around the world. But despite what President Obama keeps saying, we know the
very opposite to be true. As Reagan counseled, “Don’t be afraid to see what you
see.” America is still at war in Afghanistan. Terrorist networks like al-Qaeda
still have the ability to strike and are increasing their influence in North
Africa, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is less stable and more
paranoid than ever, as is nuclear-armed North Korea, which just tested another
nuke. Iran is racing ahead with its own nuclear-weapons program. Syria is on
fire. The Arab Spring revolution is upending the Middle East. And these, it
could be argued, are not even our principal worries. As the U.S. declaws
itself, China’s military spending has skyrocketed from
$20 billion in 2002 to some $180 billion a decade later—an unparalleled jump in
military spending on a percentage basis. The resulting arms buildup has
empowered Beijing to bully its neighbors; launch cyber-attacks against the
United States; conduct provocative military operations in space; and deploy a
swelling arsenal of missiles, submarines and warplanes aimed at countering U.S.
Naval power.

Does the president’s silence on sequestration mean he wants
the Pentagon’s budget to be cut by another $500 billion—or put another way, to
shrink over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion? Before scoffing at that
question, recall that the Pentagon was the first
place President
Obama turned when the debt crisis emerged as a political issue. “We need
to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but
conduct a fundamental review of America’s
missions, capabilities and our role in a changing world,” Obama said in 2011.

Read that again: a fundamental review of America’s missions,
capabilities and role in the world. It seems a smaller military could serve
a larger objective for the president—an America less able to act
independently; an America
that is less assertive; an America with fewer military resources, a shorter
reach, slower reflexes and a smaller global role. After the sequestration
guillotine falls, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey concludes, “We
wouldn’t be the global power that we know ourselves to be today.”

That brings us
back to the president’s Inaugural Address, which subtly underscored this
shrinking global role and reminded us that this president is not particularly
interested in the things other presidents addressed in their inaugurals: facing
global “responsibility and danger” (TR); committing to “strengthen freedom-loving nations
against the dangers of aggression” (Truman); vowing to “bear any burden…to assure the survival and the success of liberty” (JFK); building
“a security shield
that would destroy nuclear missiles before they reach their target” (Reagan);
“ending tyranny in our world” (Bush 43).

Instead, after
a campaign that promised to “focus on nation-building here at home,” President Obama
asked America to avert its gaze from North Korean nukes and Iranian centrifuges
and Syrian chemical weapons, to ignore a Middle East aflame, to look away from
a metastasizing terror threat in Pakistan and Yemen and North Africa, to stop
worrying about Beijing’s buildup and bullying. All of that is unimportant or
unreal, his soothing words suggested, because a “decade of war is now ending.”

Sure, he made
some stock references about “our brave men and women in uniform, tempered by
the flames of battle.” But that was a tee-up line for his real message: that we
are “heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn
enemies into the surest of friends,” that “we will show the courage to try and
resolve our differences with other nations peacefully,” that “engagement can
more durably lift suspicion and fear.”

The president’s
implication, though larded with faux JFK-isms, is that war is the easy choice,
peace is hard; defense and deterrence are easy, diplomacy is hard; fighting
wars is what brutes do, making peace is what statesmen like him do.

There is nothing
wrong with applauding peacemakers and engaging other nation-states to find
common ground. But there is something fundamentally wrong with suggesting that
diplomatic engagement is somehow more courageous than deterrence or what
Churchill called “decisive blows,” with using rhetorical misdirection to conceal
our massive military retrenchment, with not understanding that those Americans
who “won the peace” first defeated our enemies:

·
Yes,
President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall conceived a plan to rebuild
Western Europe, secure new friends and allies, and prevent a continent from
sliding back into war or tyranny. But before that, Gen. Marshall commanded the
U.S. Armed Forces in World War II. And Truman, as commander-in-chief, unleashed
the most powerful weapon known to man; poured
unheard-of sums into a standing peacetime army to deter our enemies; vanquished two appalling regimes; and waged
proxy wars against another (Stalin’s Soviet Union).

·
Before
he wrote a constitution for Japan—guaranteeing equal rights, education
reform, free speech, labor rights, and religious liberty—before he turned Japan
from a militarist society ruled by a god-king into a nation with enduring
levels of individual freedom, Gen. MacArthur
waged and won a just war against Japan’s armies.

·
Before
he shepherded Germany back into the family of nations, before he presided over
a partnership enfolding the Americas and Europe, before he built Obama’s
beloved interstate highway system, Gen. Eisenhower breached Hitler’s Fortress
Europe and led an army of armies into the heart of Germany to crush our enemy.

·
Before
men with names like Clay and LeMay rescued West Berlin with an armada of food-
and coal-laden planes, they were killing Nazis.

·
Before
TR won a Nobel Peace Prize, he built up America’s military strength and wielded
it to deter America’s enemies in the Caribbean, Mediterranean and Pacific.

·
Likewise,
before Reagan called Gorbachev a “friend,” he revitalized America’s deterrent strength, launched brutal proxy
wars against Gorbachev’s empire, waged economic warfare against the Soviet
state and won the Cold War.

In short, our
history shows that winning the peace comes only after securing victory. But
history is not that important to this president. How could it be? After all, it
has to do with what happened before he came on the scene—and that’s just prologue
for him. If that sounds too harsh, remember this is the man who said his
presidency would mark the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and
our planet began to heal…when we came together to remake this great nation.”

But contempt for
history can be a liability. The president’s wise men allowed the phrase “peace
in our time” to be included in his Inaugural
Address last month. It’s
difficult to understand how a phrase so fraught and freighted could slip by all
the reviews and rewrites—unless the president and his wise men simply don’t
know about or care about the history of this phrase.

This phrase, it pays to recall, is what Neville Chamberlain
uttered as he returned from a peace conference with Hitler in September 1938. Waving
a piece of paper that expressed the commitment of Germany and Britain “never to
go to war with one another again,” the well-meaning British leader declared,
“I believe it is peace in our time.” Hitler ignited World War II less than 12
months later.

Chamberlain said something else that day, a line that has
been forgotten but may be just as relevant to us: “Go home and get a nice quiet
sleep,” he soothingly reassured his countrymen.